“Personalization” in the context of distributed data networks involving clients and servers (such as the Internet or World Wide Web) is the term generally given to the process of serving content customized in some way to a requesting client. The basic mechanism for personalization in such data networks includes composing a Web page served on a Web server based on knowledge of the identity of the client.
A key problem with existing personalization technique, however, is that it can introduce significant overhead for producing content. Personalized content may require accesses to back-end databases which can consume significant central processing unit (CPU) cycles.
A number of commercial Web sites use some forms of personalization. For example, one Web site employs two levels of subscribers. The preferred status level may receive personalized content by going to the server. It may not matter what the load is on the site; clients of a given level may always get the same service level. If the system is heavily loaded, their performance may be impacted but to a lesser degree due to the use of dedicated servers. Non-preferred users may get whatever the system can support no matter if it is heavily loaded or lightly loaded. “Load” generally refers to the utilization of the Web site and/or the number of requests made for content associated with the Web site.
Web sites of weather or news related organizations typically support the concept of “extreme weather” or “big new story” situations. Such organizations may cut back on content of all types the more load they have on their Web sites. If they have no concept of preferred or non-preferred customers, personalized content simply becomes out-dated under these conditions.
Another Web site employs the concept of shifting servers if a particular category of content is getting too much load. No personalization or customer differentiation is used. Load is simply shifted based on degree of usage.
Thus, a need exists for improved serving of personalized content in a distributed data network.